My kids, enjoying the Moncton sunshine

I love my Canadian family so. much. It's been nearly impossible to get up here - New Brunswick, where I am now - for a few years, because flights from California to the East Coast of Canada are both epically long and epically expensive. But it's just been too long, and so my mom and I decided to make it happen.

Now I'm here, in Moncton, sitting at my Aunt Jo-Anne's dining room table while my Aunt Trudy reads to my son and my mom pours a glass of wine at the kitchen counter. It's been too long, but apparently that doesn't matter; this place is as familiar to me as the bedroom I grew up in. So many years later, everything is somehow still the same - except now it's my children running through the grass I ran through almost four decades ago, dodging bees and trailing bubbles. I've moved on to the grown-ups table, where I sit now, and it feels like the conversation we're having on this cloudy afternoon is the same one that's been happening all along, for centuries, in my family and others.